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Our Evening with Mr. McConaughey (You Know, That Oscar Nominee Guy)

Kelly Larson

You can learn a lot from watching Matthew McConaughey’s movies.

How to get lost in 10 days.

What a really unhealthy weight looks like.

The only right way to wear peach pants.

But turns out, you can learn a lot more by just spending a couple hours in a room with the guy. I was fortunate enough to get a front-row seat to the McConaissance (hat tip to anyone who can go from Fool’s Gold to Oscar nominee in the same decade) at a recent taping of Inside the Actors Studio.

And here’s what I learned.

It kind of seemed like he was talking directly to me. Like he fell out of the lost-art-of-storytelling tree and hit every branch on the way down or something. And if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear he was trying to make direct eye contact with every single person in the audience at least once. For those about to gentleman: take note.

He’s pretty Matthew McConaughey–like. Jumping up and down out of his chair. Running around the stage. Being all Texan. We’re going to move on now...

... to that one time James Lipton hit on him. Kind of. I think. It was right around the “let’s talk about Magic Mike” part. Next thing you know, Sir James is asking what he has to do to get a body like that (this coming from an 87-year-old man who smiles about as much as a man who really doesn’t smile that often) and lamenting publicly about how he does, in fact, not have a body like that.

Apparently he’s not Wooderson in real life. Fortunately for almost everyone, the lovely Camila Alves McConaughey was in attendance as well. And when she was asked what her husband was like in real life, it went something like “not at all the way he seems in the movies.” Surprising. Until you think about how he lost over 50 pounds in just a few months for his role as Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club (if you haven’t done it, do it). Something tells me the “I get older, they stay the same age” guy may have had a hard time mustering up the type of heroic determination it would take to pull off a stunt like that.

Oh, and there was some kid in the audience who almost never stopped doing the chest-pound thing from that one Wolf of Wall Street scene. Like, he just kept doing it. And that was pretty annoying.